FEATURE POST: Professor Sean Kammer Reviews New Title, Mississippi River Tragedies

Professor Sean Kammer is contributing to the collection development effort of the USD Law Library. Under this program, professors make recommendations for titles to be added to the Law Library's collection. Consistent with the Collection Development Policy of the Law Library, titles recommended for acquisition by the faculty are given priority consideration. If the recommended title is acquired, the faculty member provides a brief review of the title for publication on the Law Library Blog. Below Professor Kammer provides a review of a title acquired under the program. Thank you Professor Kammer!

Review of Christine A. Klein and Sandra B. Zellmer, Mississippi River Tragedies: A Century of Unnatural Disaster (NY: New York University Press, 2014)

With this work, water law scholars Christine A. Klein and Sandra B. Zellmer offer a fresh perspective on over a century of so-called “natural disasters” that have impacted (if not devastated) lives in the Mississippi River basin. In short, they contend that there is nothing “natural” about them at all. Rather, while some “natural” weather event may have precipitated each of the events, their damage to human lives resulted from a pattern of failed water development policies and shortsighted land-use planning.

Employing a largely chronological organization, the authors recount the great flood events of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, from a decade of immense flooding beginning in 1903 to the flooding of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. After each incident, the government’s response was akin to a gambler doubling down after a loss. The government began early in the century by implementing a program of levee construction. When that proved ineffective in the following decades, it supplemented levees with a system of floodways to direct floodwaters and reservoirs to store them. As flooding disasters have continued, the government has repeatedly attempted to alleviate some of the suffering through disaster relief, while providing protection against future tragedies through public flood insurance. In addition to the short-sightedness of federal water development policies, the major theme running through all of the events and the responses to them is the repeated subsidization of urban and agricultural development in the Mississippi floodplain. 

Klein and Zellmer hint at a paradox at the heart of American society’s relationship with nature. In one important sense, American notions of progress have always been intertwined with a sense of dominion over nature. It was this hubris—one perhaps at its apex in the first decades of the twentieth century—that underlay the mission of controlling floods through feats of human engineering in the first place. In another sense, however, Americans seem to recognize at some level their powerlessness against nature. Unfortunately, this humility tends to reach expression only following extreme “natural” events—be they hurricanes or tornadoes, floods or wildfires, or earthquakes or volcanic eruptions—rather than in managing for and protecting against such events in the first place. This has fostered a socio-legal culture whereby humans can place themselves and others at risk from natural events under the belief of nature having been subdued, all the while escaping accountability when nature inevitably proclaims its independence. After all, it’s not our fault.

In their conclusion, Klein and Zellmer present three axioms that they argue should serve as the foundation for federal river development policies, each of which have largely been ignored up to now. First, there will be floods. Second, there will be levee failures. And third, there will be development in floodplains absent government intervention. Accordingly, they propose a series of sensible legal reforms aimed at doing two things: (1) keeping people away from water rather than vice versa, and (2) providing rivers the opportunity to flood without it being a disaster. Given our experiences over the last century, this doesn’t seem like too much to ask.

NOTE:  Law Professor Emeritus John Davidson has also published a review of this title on the Water for Food Blog of the Robert B. Daugherty Institute at the University of Nebraska.  His review can be accessed here via his USD Law Selected Works author page.